"Botticelli Reimagined" at the V&A
March 6 2016
Video: V&A
Both Laura Freeman in The Spectator and Jackie Wullschlager in the FT were left scratching their heads at the V&A's new Botticelli Reimagined exhibition, which (as is the way these days) insists on mixing up anything vaguely old with hastily assembled dross from the world of contemporary art, presumably out of a fear that people are only interested in art that is 'new'.
Says Freeman:
It’s an oddly back-to-front exhibition. We begin with the art of the past few decades, move on to the rediscovery of Botticelli in the 19th century, and end in 15th-century Florence with the artist and his workshop. Co-curator Ana Debenedetti explains that the intention was to begin with the two most famous images and ‘peel back the layers of history’ to show how Botticelli has been made and remade. [...] It is counterintuitive and maddening to the visitor.
Happily, says Wullschlager, the old stuff knocks the new out of the park:
Vanquished by the power and sincerity of Old Master painting, the imaginatively bankrupt phantoms of conceptual art take flight, like the little devils scurrying away beneath the jewelled colours, verdant pastoral and giant Virgin in the foreground of Botticelli’s archaic, mesmerising “Mystic Nativity”.
